Discovering Rachel Wetzsteon: a belated tribute

Photo of Sakura Park by Rob Verger

In Contemporary Poetry Review (2007), Adam Kirsch reviewed Sakura Park by Rachel Wetzsteon. The full review can be read at this link. Below are portions of the excellent review:

In a perfect world, Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets of her generation. You would see people in the outdoor cafes along Upper Broadway reading copies of Sakura Park, her third collection, the way pilgrims to Greenwich Village carry Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay. For Wetzsteon’s poems manage to turn Morningside Heights—a quiet, bourgeois neighborhood near Columbia University, home to the park of her title—into a theater of romance, an intellectual haven, a flaneur’s paradise. Her poems evoke the kind of life that generations of young people have come to New York to live—earnest, glamorous, and passionate, full of sex and articulate suffering:  . . .

. . . it is heartening to see Wetzsteon affirm the city’s true glamour. Wetzsteon can write convincingly about glamour, that perilous muse, because she knows that it is not superficial, a matter of how you dress or who you know. It is, rather, one of those “structures inside the mind,” a way of seeing yourself and your surroundings as charged with mysterious significance. To be really glamorous, Wetzsteon convinces us, you need the self-awareness that comes with intelligence:  . . . 

. . . Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation. The spell of Sakura Park, woven from Wetzsteon’s intelligence and lyric deftness, has already become, for me, a part of New York’s magic.

When I read of Rachel Wetzsteon's suicide in December 2009 I tucked the obit away in my drafts because it saddened me on two counts:  #1--I could tell from the obituary that this was a tragic loss of greatness, and #2--I was unaware of this prominent poet that I should have known about if I was paying more attention to the world of modern poetry. Lesson learned.

This links to the obituary (that includes her title poem Sakura Park):
Rachel Wetzsteon, poet mixed melancholy, wit - The Boston Globe


This is a photo of Dr. Rachel Wetzsteon:

And this is one of her poems published in The New Republic in tribute to her, their poetry editor of only four months.

Short Ode to Morningside Heights

 -- by Rachel Wetzsteon

Convergence of worlds, old stomping ground,
comfort me in my dark apartment
when my latest complaint shrinks my focus
to a point so small its hugely present
but barely there, and I fill the air
with all the spiteful words I spared the streets.

The pastry shop’s abuzz
with crazy George and filthy graffiti,
but the peacocks are strutting across the way
and the sumptuous cathedral gives
the open-air banter a reason to deepen:
build structures inside the mind, it tells
the languorous talkers, to rival the ones outside!

Things are and are not solid.
As Opera Night starts at Caffe Taci,
shapes hurry home with little red bags,
but do they watch the movies they hold
or do they forego movies for rooftops
where they catch Low’s floating dome in the act
of always being about to fly away?

Ranters, racers, help me remember
that the moon-faced fountain’s the work of many hands,
that people linger at Toast long after we’ve left.
And as two parks frame the neighborhood—
green framing gray and space calming clamor—
be for me, well-worn streets, a context
I can’t help carrying home, a night fugue
streaming over my one-note how, when, why.
Be the rain for my barren indoor cry.

Caffe Taci in Spring 2003, in Rachel's neighborhood,
prior to relocating in 2005 to Greenwich Village.

Toast - upper Broadway near Columbia campus